Nothing Says Christmas Like The Beginning of The End

A commentary by film critic Jeffery Overstreet has reminded me of something I'd forgotten; the best-quality, most truthful Christmas film I've watched to date: Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men.

The director vowed repeatedly to interviewers that he did not intend any Christian implications with the film; an interesting avowal, since the film is based on a book by a prominent Christian author. Either way, if that was truly Cuaron's intent, he failed miserably, to the benefit of us all. This stunning, heartbreaking, hopeful, glorious film - all adjectives I'd not expect to use in order to describe an apocalypse - tells the story of our world having gone infertile. When the film opens, with the death of the world's youngest person, it has been nearly twenty years since the last child was born. Is it any surprise that such a world has lost all hope and purpose, reducing itself to isolationism and anarchy? And yet, somehow, a girl named Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) is pregnant - a young black girl, at the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder, especially loathed and endagered in a Britain turned utterly protectionist and facist. It is charged to an older man named Theo (Clive Owen) to get her to safety, to people who will, we are told, not endanger her or her child, or use the baby for their own selfish political purposes. The journey that ensues is frantic and desperate, but always, at the forefront, keeping everything going, is the hope of the child to come.

The one scene that has always flattened me as surely as a punch on the nose is the one that takes place hours after the baby is born, when Theo and Kee are trying to escape the condemned apartment that's become one more war zone in a world of war zones. As they make their was into the hall, people notice the baby, and the fighting trickles to a standstill as all turn, shocked, amazed, and overcome, to witness the child's passing...and a third of the way through the hall, just as Kee and the baby have passed, the fighting immediately resumes as a man, at the very corner back of the screen and out of focus, is shot in the head. Not only are there some tragic and critical social and theological implications at work here; this scene also affirms to me that, in a film with a deliberately large and horrific body count, every death matters; no life is taken for granted.

There's not much to say about the cinematography or acting without killing at least 3000 words. This is a first-rate film in every sense. And this really is the season for it. Of course, I know someone, a fellow Christian, who thinks this film is so exactly the opposite of how I've described it that she gave us her copy, and that's how we got it for free. So...you know...this review may fail you horribly. I sure hope not.